


Death of the Author

by Daisiestdaisy (Doyle)



Category: Gotham (TV)
Genre: 3x15 related, M/M, Missing Scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-29
Updated: 2017-04-29
Packaged: 2018-10-25 12:25:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,777
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10764237
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Doyle/pseuds/Daisiestdaisy
Summary: "There was the curator, the writer... pretentious ass. So frustrating."





	Death of the Author

**Author's Note:**

> Sparked by a comment Legs/zsaszmatazz made about Ed's loneliness riddle, so thank you!

Ed’s trying not to get too discouraged. He’s only been doing this for eight days, he reminds himself. It took twenty-eight _years_ to find Oswald – “And even then,” his imaginary Oswald says, peering at the board he’s put up in the living room, the two photographs there crossed through with red marker, “fate had to literally throw me helpless at your feet before I paid any attention to you.”

It sounds like he means it to be sarcastic, but it’s a nice memory, one of Ed’s most treasured, and it makes him smile.

Still, he can’t help but worry. Gotham’s not exactly teeming with potential mentors, and he’s already two down. The curator was a disappointment, the physicist even worse. So maybe he pinned his hopes a little too high on tonight’s lucky contender: a writer, someone who’s been on Ed’s radar for years, who seemed to have so much potential.

He’s the worst one yet.

“Blood?” Ed snaps. “How could it possibly be ‘blood’?”

Hands bound, flex cable securing him to his office chair, Jackson Temple still stares back at him with arrogant condescension, as if Ed’s an idiot for questioning his _wrong, moronic, wrong_ answer. Between that and this cramped, book-lined study, Ed feels like he’s back in college, being asked impossible questions about an inscrutable novel in some awful Lit 101 seminar – ironic, because Temple’s own book was the only one on his reading list he ever actually enjoyed.

“ _A member of a group_ ,” Temple quotes back at him. Hearing his own carefully-constructed words in that affected mid-Atlantic voice sets Ed’s teeth on edge. He’s been researching Temple for days, and he knows for a fact the man was born in Gotham. “Type A, Type B, so forth... _but can never blend in_. ‘Out, out, damn spot!’ And it’s thematically appropriate to this little skit of yours.”

There has to be some middle ground, Ed thinks, between the curator’s mewling terror that left him grovelling on the floor, unable to even hazard a guess at an answer, and this sheer disrespect for him and everything he’s trying to accomplish.

“You’re wrong,” he says, feeling petulant. “It’s an individual.”

“Oh,” Temple says, and there’s a surprised pleasure in it that almost renews Ed’s hope, until he says, “I see: a reference to my _A Man Alone_. Well, that works, I suppose.”

This man is taking credit for inspiring Ed’s riddles. He breathes out through his nose, and has to clench his hands hard into fists to stop them creeping to the pillbox in his breast pocket. As much as Ed would welcome his presence, Oswald would be a distraction right now.

“I read your novel about the Elliot-Kane double homicide in college,” Ed tells him. “I don’t know your other books. Not my thing. I only really like mysteries.”

“Disappointing,” Temple grunts. “And yet, somehow not surprising. Did you have any kind of insight about _Life and_ _Death in Gotham_ , at least?”

Fresh from having his own work trounced by this man, he’s not in the mood to flatter him, but he’s not going to lie, either – he did like the book, and it’s what made him consider Temple as a new teacher. “I liked the parts from Ellesmere Kane’s point of view,” he says. He remembers slowing down on the chapters building up to the murders, wanting to stay inside Kane’s head for longer, and finally closing the book to find himself all alone in the library, the doors locked for the night. “It read like you understood him. Why he did it. What made him that way.” He looks at him, this man who didn’t invent Kane, but who put those thoughts into his head and knew the right words to describe them: “You seemed to really see him.”

“I did see him,” Temple says. “Every Tuesday at Arkham for three years while I researched the damn thing. Anything else? Beyond the sophomoric ‘I liked it, it was good’? You’ll excuse me, but young writers have been pulling damn fool stunts like this to get my eyes on their manuscripts since you were in kindergarten, son. I assume yours is some by-the-numbers dross about a serial killer who leaves behind riddles as clues?”

Ed laughs. He didn’t expect it, and it feels _good;_ he claps his hands together, not trying to restrain himself. Temple looks like he hates being laughed at, so they do have that in common, at least. “Oh,” Ed says. “Oh, I understand now. You think this is a game. Well, you’re not wrong. I think you just don’t appreciate the stakes.”

“This has gone far beyond a joke. Release me at once.” For the first time, Temple struggles in his chair, and maybe he didn’t realize until now that those loose-seeming bonds constrict with movement. Ed’s good with knots.

It’s a delight, seeing doubt suddenly cloud that arrogant face.

“Last chance,” he says. He’d happily kill him right now, but rules are rules. “Zero for two so far, but I only need one right answer.”

“Listen, a joke’s a joke, but...”

“I can fill a room, or just one heart.”

“I have very important friends!”

“Others may have me, but I can’t be shared.” Ed spreads his arms wide, almost touching bookshelves on both sides. “What am I?”

Temple mutters the words to himself, finally giving this a modicum of the attention it deserves. Maybe there’s hope for him yet. Ed is, cross his heart and hope to die, ready to let him live provided the next thing he says is...

“Ennui.”

Ed lets his eyes close, and open again. It’s too slow to be called a blink.

“Or _weltschmerz_ , if you prefer, although I would say...”

“Enough!” He pivots on his heel away from Temple, just to give himself a moment to calm down. “The answer is loneliness,” he says, and by coincidence the book that draws his eye on the shelf right in front of him is a thick hardback with a green spine, Temple’s name embossed on it in gold: _A Man Alone_. He feels like he’s being mocked.

“Loneliness can’t fill a room,” Temple says – has the audacity to say to him, and when Ed doesn’t reply or turn around he somehow takes that as an invitation to keep spewing out words. “By definition, it’s an absence, a lack of connectedness. Even metaphorically, the idea that it could fill a space...”

Ed doesn’t bother telling him that loneliness is a tangible thing; that it can wrap around you at night until you feel deaf and blind and suffocated; that it can fill a room, a house, a mansion. Temple’s led a charmed life if he doesn’t know that already, if he’s never had to spend a night by himself in a dead loved-one’s house.

Instead, he reaches out to pull _A Man Alone_ from the shelf. It’s a hefty volume. He’s glad this one wasn’t assigned reading.

“The answer is loneliness,” he says.

“Respectfully,” Temple says, “I would suggest that my answer is better.”

“Disrespectfully, I’d reply that my answer is the correct answer.”

“Who’s to say there’s only one correct answer?”

“Me,” he says. “It’s my riddle.”

“Well, other interpretations are equally valid – you have to consider...”

Ed’s memory is perfect, which unfortunately means he’s stuck with all those tedious literature seminars in his head forever, but silver lining: it means he gets that Temple, when Ed turns, has that horrified look on his face because he’s trying to keep the words ‘death of the author’ from spilling out of his mouth.

Although it’s probably also because Ed has judged exactly where in the head he needs to hit him, and is already drawing that hard, heavy book back as high as it will go.

**

It’s such a relief to get home. He calls Oswald’s name as he walks through the door, telling himself – as he has been for days – that it’s a necessary ruse in case Gabe or Zsasz have come by looking for him, or Olga’s decided to work late. The house, of course, is silent.

He’s taken to washing down the pills with tea, the sharp-sweet taste of honey and ginger helping with the bitterness, the dryness they leave in his mouth. The pot is still warm when Oswald shows up.

He’s early, appearing at Ed’s shoulder as he puts a red X through Temple’s photograph on the board, and it catches Ed off guard. He wonders if he should start logging this, measuring the time between swallowing the pill and feeling the dizziness and the acceleration in his pulse that means his friend is about to appear. He’s sure, although he doesn’t have the data to back this up, that in the beginning it was fifteen minutes, then ten; it’s barely been six.

“So I guess we abandoned the idea of passing that off as a suicide,” Oswald says. “Unless Mr Temple beat _himself_ to death with one of his own books.”

“Minor change of plan. Now it was a home invasion by a deranged fan. They left a note.” A hurried job, without the elegant hidden acrostic clue that his planned faked suicide note would have included. He’s not proud of it. “You were right. He was an insufferable ass.”

Oswald shrugs. It makes the oil-slick on his shoulder gleam in rainbow colors. “Writers. I just assumed.”

“Three to go. I think the conceptual artist next.”

“Oh, well, no risk of pretension there.”

“Her work is...” Macabre. Twisted, in ways he suspects didn’t come entirely from her imagination. “Interesting. We should do it tomorrow night. She’s leaving on Friday to set up an exhibition in Keystone.”

It’ll mean another all-nighter, but that’s what the pills are for, after all; he feels so awake, so ready to work. And his tolerance for them’s been getting better – something else he should be keeping data on – so he’s confident it won’t be like that first time he tried to keep Oswald with him all night, when he ended up shaking and sweating on the floor of the master bathroom while a figment of his own imagination mused out loud on whether it would be the worst thing in the world, really, if his hammering heart just gave out.

Live and learn.

“It’ll get my notes,” he says, excited for a new plan, feeling positive about potential mentor number four. An artist, with an artist’s eye; this is going to be the one.

“Ed,” Oswald calls after him, “how long are you going to drag out this charade?” but he’s said that before, and it doesn’t seem like something that warrants a response.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm at vampirebillionaire.tumblr.com


End file.
